What are the smart take-aways from the narrow victory of Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Democratic primary for U.S. Senate?  One lesson has to be that big money spent on ads doesn’t always win. “Overall, Stevens and her allies spent nearly nine times as much on advertising as El-Sayed and his allied groups did, according to AdImpact, an ad-tracking firm,” Henry J. Gomez writes at nbcnews.com. However, it does appear that the big money reduced the lead many expected from the most recent opinion polls. El-Sayed’s victory may lend some credibility to the notion that American voters are now more open to progressive candidates. Progressive organizer Will Lawrence also won his race for the Democratic nomination in a battleground congressional district in Michigan. As Grace Panetta writes at the 19th, “Lawrence, an original co-founder of the climate activist group Sunrise Movement, defeated former U.S. Ambassador  Bridget Brink and ex-Navy SEAL Matt Maasdam for the Democratic primary for Michigan’s 7th District, currently represented by Rep. Tom Barrett.”  El-Sayed, who has an M.D., is a strong advocate for Medicare for All and said so frequently. That may have resonated with Michiganders who are feeling squeezed by rising costs for health care. El-Sayed is a compelling candidate, who articulated clear and crisp policy positions in fairly stark contrast to Stevens, who used more words to say less in policy debates.  Stevens did win Michigan’s emblematically white working-class Macomb county by a margin of 51.8 to El-Sayed’s 44.3 percent. Now we will see how good Dr. El-Sayed is at expanding his electoral coalition and beating Republicans.

At Semafor, David Weigel argues in “An inconclusive Tuesday, in Michigan and beyond” that “The left hasn’t taken over the Democratic Party yet,” and notes: “Sunrise Movement co-founder Will Lawrence won his race in Michigan’s 7th District handily, over two vote-splitting center-left candidates. That was the only early, decisive win for a movement that just nearly unseated a senator in Colorado…In Missouri, former Rep. Cori Bush didn’t even come close to beating Rep. Wesley Bell, the Democrat who unseated her with heavy AIPAC support two years ago and didn’t need as much this time. Michigan state Rep. Donavan McKinney, the strongest challenger Shri Thanedar has faced in three House races, was leading by single digits. So was Abdul El-Sayed, whose Michigan Senate campaign radiated confidence in the final weeks, as public and private polling showed him besting Rep. Haley Stevens by close to 20 points…The left is still on the verge of historic wins in Michigan (though Kyle Blomquist, the Democratic Socialists of America’s candidate, flopped in the mostly rural 1st District, where Republicans are favored to win in November). But there were two stories in the state, of years of progressive organizing paying off and a historic amount of PAC money flowing in to stop it…That money wasn’t really there in Colorado, and it came late in New York. In Washington, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez faced a progressive challenger who channeled the anger of local activists at her votes with Republicans — and posed no threat whatsoever…None of this means the left has already peaked. It does suggest that Democrats who want to rally primary voters against left-wing candidates can do that, with enough time and money. That’s going to get noticed by Democrats in Wisconsin and Minnesota, who are trying to convince late-deciding primary voters to reject progressives like Francesca Hong and Peggy Flanagan.“Tomorrow we begin to mend fences,” El-Sayed told his supporters in Detroit. “If your instinct is to be like, ‘I told you’ — no!” That was a less triumphant, hubristic tone than his supporters were taking, up to 8 pm on Tuesday.”

In “It’s Still a Blue Wave,” William Kristol writes at The Bulwark, “It would be nice to be able to draw some novel, surprising, or dramatic conclusions from last night’s election results. But sometimes the truth is messy and prosaic. The fact is that the results were a mixed bag. And they don’t seem to me to change anything much about what’s likely to happen in November…The highest profile race was the Michigan Democratic Senate primary. The polls suggested that the leftist insurgent, Abdul El-Sayed, would easily defeat the establishment candidate, Haley Stevens, perhaps by double digits. It looks early this morning that El-Sayed will likely eke out a victory by a percentage point or two..It’s a good reminder that polling in primaries can be unreliable. More importantly, it probably means Republican Mike Rogers, who almost won his senate race against Elissa Slotkin in 2024, has better odds than he otherwise would have had this November. But the national environment will still help the Democratic nominee, and it’s also the case that some swing voters may be more attracted to the change El-Sayed represents than put off by some of his left-of-the-mainstream views. So while this is a chance—very likely the only one—for a Republican Senate pickup, it’s by no means guaranteed…On the other hand, the continuing cascade of news about Rep. Max Miller’s horrifying personal behavior, combined with his determination to stay in the race for his Ohio congressional seat, makes me more convinced than ever that Democrats will have a better-than-expected cycle in that state—and that Sherrod Brown could very well win the Senate race there…Put that together with likely Democratic pickups in North Carolina and Maine, and decent opportunities for victory in Alaska, Iowa, and Texas, and I think Democrats have a pretty good chance—I’d say slightly better than 50-50—of controlling the Senate.” More here.

WaPo’s James Hohmann conducts a good interview with TDS contributor, Ruy Teixeira: